Preferred method for "Assignment by value"

[Arnaud Delobelle]

On Apr 15, 6:23 pm, hall.j... at gmail.com wrote:
> As a relative new comer to Python, I haven't done a heck of a lot of
> hacking around with it. I had my first run in with Python's quirky (to
> me at least) tendency to assign by reference rather than by value (I'm
> coming from a VBA world so that's the terminology I'm using). I was
> surprised that these two cases behave so differently

Perhaps it is better to think that you bind the name 'x' to the object
'42' when you write 'x=42'.

> test = [[1],[2]]
> x = test[0]
> x[0] = 5
> test>>> [[5],[2]]
>
> x = 1
> test
>
> >>>[[5],[2]]
> x
> >>> 1
>
> Now I've done a little reading and I think I understand the problem...
> My issue is, "What's the 'best practise' way of assigning just the
> value of something to a new name?"
>
> i.e.
> test = [[1,2],[3,4]]
> I need to do some data manipulation with the first list in the above
> list without changing <test>
> obviously x = test[0] will not work as any changes i make will alter
> the original...
> I found that I could do this:
> x = [] + test[0]
>
> that gets me a "pure" (i.e. unconnected to test[0] ) list but that
> concerned me as a bit kludgy
>
> Thanks for you time and help.

To create a new list with the same elements as a sequence seq, you can
use list(seq). 'list' is the type of lists, it is also a 'constructor'
for list objects (the same goes for other common buit-in types, such
as 'int', 'float', 'str', 'tuple', 'dict').

E.g.

>>> foo = [1, 2, 3]
>>> bar = list(foo)
>>> foo[0] = 4
>>> foo
[4, 2, 3]
>>> foo = [1, 2, 3]
>>> bar = list(foo)
>>> bar[0] = 4
>>> bar
[4, 2, 3]
>>> foo
[1, 2, 3]
>>>

HTH

--
Arnaud